Zohran Mamdani’s “apology tour” to quell the business community’s outrage over his bizarre social media posting targeting fellow business leader Ken Griffin didn’t include much apologizing, The Post has learned.
In fact, Griffin’s name and Mamdani’s “creepy” stunt — where he stood outside the Citadel chief’s penthouse to brag about taxing the rich — never came up in the confabs Monday with two of the biggest CEOs on Mamdani’s agenda, Jamie Dimon, the chief of mega bank JP Morgan and David Solomon, the CEO of investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.
Don’t blame our Marxist mayor for ignoring the obvious — that his social media spot targeting Griffin isn’t just bad policy, since it will drive away the investors the city needs, it’s also dangerous given the recent spate of violence directed at the CEO class by leftists.
No, point the finger at Dimon and Solomon for being too timid to even gently remind Mamdani that his rhetoric is making the city increasingly uninhabitable for business — not just theirs but anyone who employs working class people in the five boroughs.
Yes, I know both are two of the city’s biggest employers, and you can make the case they have a lot to lose.
But they lost so much already, and their years of acquiescence to the loons in city and state government has just made them an increasingly bigger target for taxes, welfare-state schemes and the defund the police policies that put their middle-class employees at risk.
And as they say in boxing, they had Mamdani on the ropes.
The highly anticipated meetings were set up last month by Mamdani’s staff after the business advocacy group, the Partnership for New York City, explained that his social media spot about Griffin wasn’t sitting well with the people he needs to pay for all those welfare perks he wants to hand out.
Mamdani’s leftist policies and Marist proselytizing was forcing many business leaders not committed to moving elsewhere, to start thinking about relocation. In a panic, Mamdani’s staff began dialing up business leaders to explain how he doesn’t really hate them, even if thinks rich people, who pay most of the city’s taxes, really don’t pay their “fair share.”
That’s a hard one to swallow — yet two of the most savvy businessmen I know did just that.
A JP Morgan source told me Dimon and Mamdani really hit it off. “It was a constructive friendly meeting on ways we can forge public and private partnerships.”
Griffin’s name “never came up” during the “friendly and constructive” sit-down.
Dimon even gave Mamdani a book about economic development, as if he thinks he could overnight fill the gaps in the mayor’s ideology.
Ditto for Solomon, who went to Gracie Mansion for his pow wow to kiss the proverbial ring.
Ken Griffin’s name didn’t need to come up, people with knowledge of Solomon’s conversation said, because “Dimon and Solomon made it clear that the mayor shouldn’t do things to discourage business from staying in the city,” a person with knowledge of the conversation said.
Still, the two hit it off so much that DJ D-Sol (Solomon has a side hustle as a DJ in the Hamptons party circuit) invited the smiling Marxist to Goldman Sachs’ elegant West Side headquarters to prove that investment bankers don’t have horns growing out of their skulls.
Or maybe Solly wants to tap into Mamdani’s playlist; our mayor was, after all, a rapper before jumping into left-wing politics.
Ken Griffin, who has so far rebuffed the mayor after being threatened by him, minced few words in explaining the threat of Mamdani at the Milken Institute conference a couple of weeks ago. Griffin will double-down on an expansion not in New York, but Miami, where the government offers the “American Dream and a dream of earned success, not a dream of redistributive handouts that leave people dependent on government for their lives.”
Well said. Too bad Dimon and Solomon didn’t make the point. What are they afraid of?
